Here is an interesting reminder how big the solar system really is. These people used a weather balloon to represent the sun. Then the planets were marbles of varying sizes, and they had to be placed miles apart in the Nevada desert to represent the right size. They tried to measure it out accurately, then drove around in the dark and used time lapse photography to capture the orbits. Cool stuff.
Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
According to The Atlantic,
Wiener is best known as the inventor of “cybernetics,” a fertile combination of mathematics and engineering that paved the way for modern automation and inspired innovation in a host of other fields. He was also one of the first theorists to identify information as the lingua franca of organisms as well as machines, a shared language capable of crossing the boundaries between them…
Wiener refused, for ethical reasons, to accept research contracts from the military or from corporations seeking to exploit his ideas. Since the military and corporations were the main sources of research support, Wiener’s defiance hindered his progress during a period of unprecedented technological advance. Besides nuclear weapons, Wiener was perhaps most worried about the technology he was most directly responsible for developing: automation. Sooner than most, he recognized how businesses could use it at the expense of labor, and how eager they were to do so. “Those who suffer from a power complex,” he wrote in 1950, “find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions…”
The complete synthesis of humans and machines predicted by the transhumanists could represent the vindication of cybernetics—as well as Wiener’s ultimate nightmare. His fears for the future stemmed from two fundamental convictions: We humans can’t resist selfishly misusing the powers our machines give us, to the detriment of our fellow humans and the planet; and there’s a good chance we couldn’t control our machines even if we wanted to, because they already move too fast and because increasingly we’re building them to make decisions on their own. To believe otherwise, Wiener repeatedly warned, represents a dangerous, potentially fatal, lack of humility.
What did I learn in September? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.
Negative stories (-11):
Positive stories (+9):
This article suggests we need less critical thinking and more creative thinking. This may be true if we are interpreting the word “critical” the way it is often used in everyday speech, to mean oppositional, argumentative, closed minded, cynical. But I don’t think that is the intended meaning of critical thinking at all. Critical thinking is about using the powerful analytical tools of reason, logic, induction, provided by fields such as science, engineering, economics, even philosophy. You need analytical tools to decide which options are better than others for solving a given problem or achieving a given goal. But before you can apply the analytical tools, you need creativity to come up with a wide range of possible ways to achieve the desired outcome, ranging from dumb to brilliant. Then you use the analytical tools to separate the dumb from the brilliant. Without creativity, that needle-in-a-haystack brilliant idea will never be in the mix.
To solve tomorrow’s complex problems, we can’t be forcing today’s kids to make a false choice between creative and critical thinking. They have to learn how to combine both, every day. Einstein didn’t make that choice, he was an avid violinist and even credited music as inspiration for his theories. Sherlock Holmes was also an avid violinist. Only he wasn’t real, he was a fictional character, the product of a creative mind, who engaged in highly logical inductive reasoning, in lateral, non-traditional, and very creative ways. It takes some creativity to wrap your head around that one.
I always suspected that ignorance and arrogance were closely related, and that the truly competent know their limits and are appropriately uncomfortable when beyond them. But now here is proof!
In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.
Sherlock Holmes knew that science and problem solving are about logic and reason, supported by facts. Creativity is the opposite of all that, right? Not so fast, according to an article and book by Maria Konnikova. Facts play a role, and Holmes had a large but carefully organized “attic” of the ones that he felt were most useful. To solve problems, you need a lot of information in your head, and access to a lot more, because you never know in advance which facts are going to combine in which way to produce an answer. The process of putting those facts together is not always cold, organized, and logical. In fact, you can’t force it. Holmes was willing to sit and contemplate as long as it took, distract his mind with music and recreational drugs, and let his mind access the facts in the background and bring him the solutions.
Negative stories:
Positive stories:
This is a great example of meta-analysis in Active Living Research. There are a few things I like about it. First, it combines academic literature, other literature, and expert opinion in a very transparent and defensible way, by giving each a score. It takes a very wide array of urban design and planning choices and relates them to a number of outcomes (physical health, mental health, environmental sustainability, health and safety, and economic growth), and draws quantitative conclusions about the importance of each. Some outcomes challenge my pre-conceived notions, for example that street connectivity is bad for safety, but the methodology is very transparent, so I can dig in if I want and try to figure out whether I disagree with a particular rating, or whether I really should rethink my preconceived notion. Those of us dealing with complex planning and engineering programs (and many other complex systems) can’t realistically expect to optimize a handful of objectives any more. Instead, we can play the odds by making sure all our small, daily decisions have a better than even chance of nudging the system in a desired direction, based on the complete body of evidence out there, even with all its contradictions and confusions.
Here is Donella Meadows explaining how your bathtub is like your bank account.
If you’re about to take a bath, you have a desired water level in mind. You plug the drain, turn on the faucet and watch until the water rises to your chosen level (until the discrepancy between the desired and the actual state of the system is zero). Then you turn the water off.
If you start to get in the bath and discover that you’ve underestimated your volume and are about to produce an overflow, you can open the drain for awhile, until the water goes down to your desired level.
Those are two negative feedback loops, or correcting loops, one controlling the inflow, one controlling the outflow, either or both of which you can use to bring the water level to your goal. Notice that the goal and the feedback connections are not visible in the system. If you were an extraterrestrial trying to figure out why the tub fills and empties, it would take awhile to figure out that there’s an invisible goal and a discrepancy-measuring process going on in the head of the creature manipulating the faucets. But if you watched long enough, you could figure that out.
Very simple so far. Now let’s take into account that you have two taps, a hot and a cold, and that you’re also adjusting for another system state — temperature. Suppose the hot inflow is connected to a boiler way down in the basement, four floors below, so it doesn’t respond quickly. And you’re making faces at yourself in the mirror and not paying close attention to the water level. And, of course, the inflow pipe is connected to a reservoir somewhere, which is connected to the whole planetary hydrological cycle. The system begins to get complex, and realistic, and interesting.
Mentally change the bathtub into your checking account. Write checks, make deposits, add a faucet that keeps dribbling in a little interest and a special drain that sucks your balance even drier if it ever goes dry. Attach your account to a thousand others and let the bank create loans as a function of your combined and fluctuating deposits, link a thousand of those banks into a federal reserve system — and you begin to see how simple stocks and flows, plumbed together, make up systems way too complex to figure out.
Surprisingly, serious studies of homework can almost never prove that it has any benefit at all.
And the result of this fine-tuned investigation? There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”
This result clearly caught the researchers off-guard. Frankly, it surprised me, too. When you measure “achievement” in terms of grades, you expect to see a positive result — not because homework is academically beneficial but because the same teacher who gives the assignments evaluates the students who complete them, and the final grade is often based at least partly on whether, and to what extent, students did the homework. Even if homework were a complete waste of time, how could it not be positively related to course grades?
And yet it wasn’t. Again. Even in high school. Even in math. The study zeroed in on specific course grades, which represents a methodological improvement, and the moral may be: The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework. (That’s not a surprising proposition for a careful reader of reports in this field. We got a hint of that from Timothy Keith’s reanalysis and also from the fact that longer homework studies tend to find less of an effect.[5])
This is hard to swallow. Obviously, from our adult life experience, most of us know there is such a thing as learning by doing. To really master a concept or come up with a new idea, you have to struggle with it on your own over a period of time. Homework seems like it could prepare children to do that as adults, so if it is not, either the kind of homework given is the wrong kind, or it’s given at the wrong age where kids are not yet ready to benefit from it.
